Star Trek: Start to Finish

And the Children Shall Lead

And the Children Shall Lead (Video; Memory Alpha) is a neat idea that runs out of steam before the credits and then flails about being boring for forty more minutes.

The nugget of goodness is that an evil spirit has convinced the children on the new colony of Triacus to kill their parents and then take over the galaxy, using the Enterprise as their transport. The spirit gives the kids powers and they chant creepy things and look odd.

I would start a spoilers block here, but there are no spoilers in this episode: eventually Kirk figures out how to turn the kids and wins the day. But it takes him an entire episode of wandering around the ship and seeing people do crazy things before he tries, because “they’re children!”

This episode has Kirk ignoring a blatant threat to the ship, McCoy disappearing into sick bay and not participating in the plot, and Spock being completely unhelpful in bothering to explain how any of this makes any sense at all.

It’d be okay if the kids were hiding something that kept the spirit alive and Kirk had to find the McGuffin, but they’re not. It’d be okay if the spirit could be extracted from the kids and we could see progress as each kid is freed and the plot unfurls, but that’s not the case. It’d be okay if the opposite happened, and the plot slowly reached tentacles into the crew, but it’s not.

What I’m trying to say is that this is a mediocre episode completely ruined by pacing (back to our old nemesis) and a lack of an explanation.

Summary Quote

McCoy: They’re crying, Jim. I don’t know how it happened, but it’s good to see.
[We saw how it happened, and it didn’t make any sense to us, anyway. But it is good to see, because it means that this episode is over.]

Grade

D-

The Paradise Syndrome

The Paradise Syndrome (Memory Alpha; HD Video) starts on a beautiful pastoral scene that looks a lot like Earth but that, by all measures, shouldn’t. There’s honeysuckle, orange blossom, Amerindians, and a giant green monolith. Well, the giant green monolith is a bit odd, I’ll admit.

Oh, and there’s an asteroid hurtling toward the planet.

But then Kirk falls down a secret shaft and gets lost and the Enterprise has to leave to deflect the asteroid and when Kirk wakes up he can’t remember who he is!

Dammit, this is an amnesia episode. Amnesia episodes are crap.

But this one, surprisingly, is not at all.

Begin Spoilers

Kirk is adopted by the natives as a God, and saves a boy from drowning to prove his bona fides.

Spock and the rest of the crew, meanwhile, are failing to stop the asteroid. After burning out the warp engines (they burned them up going “maximum warp,” which is once again Warp 9), they have two months to get back to the planet and activate the monolith, which is a conveniently-placed asteroid deflector, left by “The Preservers” who plucked the Amerindians from Earth and deposited them here many years ago. This incredibly important setting point is dropped in with just enough amazement that you can believe it, but not enough that you can believe it will ever be mentioned again.

No really, Spoilers!

Kirk is still back on the planet, and in those two months he marries the chief’s daughter, and then get her pregnant. Yeah, so this episode is a small event in Kirk’s life.

When the asteroid gets close, though, the natives expect their God to open the monolith and save them, and when he can’t they stone him and his wife, which is not a good thing to do to a pregnant lady.

But the Enterprise arrives in time, they figure out how to open the monolith, and they save the day.

Except Kirks wife, who’s been mortally wounded by a number of rocks hurtled at her by ignorant savages. She’s gonna die. Convenient wrap up of that little plot. (Interesting side note: Memory Alpha claims the original script had her live, which would have complicated Kirk’s choices rather a lot. Does he just leave her there?)

End Spoilers

If you can get over the incredibly cheesy 60s Indian outfits and the incredibly cheesy 60s Indian makeup and the not quite as cheesy 60s Indian actors, this is a pretty good episode. Shatner gets to play real love, which is a dramatic range he doesn’t usually get to play, but he does a pretty good job at it. Spock gets to be all smarty and figure out the puzzle, which is actually kind of neat. McCoy gets to do his concerned-doctor schtick that he’s so good at. And Scotty does his “I canna give you any more” deal, even if he doesn’t give that line.

Awesome Dialog

McCoy: Spock, what is it?
Spock: His mind. He’s an… extremely dynamic individual.

Best Dialog In Perhaps Ever

Kirk: More symbols. Can you read them?
Spock: I do have an excellent eye for musical notes, Captain. They would seem to indicate that–
Kirk: Spock, just press the right button.

Grade

B+; would be more, but the cheese smothers it a bit

The Enterprise Incident

The Enterprise Incident (Memory Alpha; HD Video) finds Kirk taking our favorite starship deep into Romulan territory because he was bored. They are immediately surrounded by Romulans.

This episode is incredibly predictable, and continues the long line of episodes where a woman in a major role neglects her duties because she’s smitten. The woman in this case is the Romulan fleet commander, and her neglect lets our heros win the day, but only because they play the woman’s emotions against her. If a Romulan woman came aboard the Enterprise, Kirk would see through the same trick so quickly it wouldn’t be worth building an episode around.

This is all the more shameful because Joanne Linville plays a very interesting Romulan; a warrior and an executive, wanting passion but ambitious. But her bounds as a character shrink with every line she utters. The gender stereotypes slowly eat away at what starts as a command performance until there’s nothing left by my retrospective sadness that this show that was so progressive in so many ways was still held hostage to Gene Roddenberry’s personal vices.

Awesome Dialog

Commander: How could you do this to me? Who are you that you could do this?
Spock: First Officer of the Enterprise.
[She slaps him]
Spock: [Unflinching] What is your present mode of execution?

Two technical notes: First, the Enterprise here goes Warp 9, which should blow the ship up. Second, this episode features a lot of beaming onto and off of shielded ships, which should be impossible.

Grade

D

Spock’s Brain

Spock’s Brain (Memory Alpha; HD Video) has a premise as ridiculous as it’s title: a near-naked woman beams aboard the Enterprise from an advanced ship and steals Spock’s brain from out of his head.

Far more important, though, is that this is the first episode of season three, and they switched to blue titles instead of yellow, which is really wigging me out. As if that wasn’t enough, Kirk is thin and Scotty has weird hair.

Back in the fake world, Kirk is setting out to find Spock’s brain within the twenty-four hours Spock’s body can live on its own. They chase the ship to a system with three inhabitable planets that might be hiding the McGuffin. There’s a genuinely neat scene where Kirk, Chekov, Sulu and Uhura all interact as if the rest of the crew matters and it’s not all about Kirk, Spock and Bones. This glimpse of a more inclusive decision-making process reminds me a lot of the Next Generation conference room scenes where all the major characters get together to talk through the problem at hand. Those scenes are a staple of Next Gen but are almost nonexistent in this series.

But then we jump back to Kirk and Bones searching for Spock, with Scotty in tow as a replacement technical wizard. It’s kind of sad that Scotty gets short shrift in so many episodes; Doohan is capable of doing so much with the character, and whenever he’s given the chance we get some great performances, but he just can’t get enough screen time to make it work.

This is another episode that heavily plays on Kirk’s loyalty to his friend, and it treads that already well-trod ground without kicking up any new dust.

But in spite of the ridiculous premise and a bland reveal, this episode is good. Doohan and Shatner perform well, Kelley gets a chance to play his usual love/hate relationship with Spock, and the villainess is neither over the top nor banal.

Best bit of ironic dialog

“I certainly did notice the delightful ass…pects”

Grade

A-

Assignment: Earth

Assignment: Earth (HD Video; Memory Alpha) starts with the Enterprise in 1968 to conduct historical research. No extraordinary circumstances; they’re just there. Or then, I guess. Time travel being new and interesting is so last season.

But oh no! Someone is beaming onto the Enterprise from a thousand light years away! What the heck!?!

Oh, it’s a guy and a cat. They can’t be all that bad. And “Gary Seven” just wants to go down to Earth and make sure everything turns out like our favorite starship crew remembers it. But how can the crew be so sure that he’s not trying to muck up history? (why the heck are they there, again?)

The rest of the episode involves the crew trying to decide if Gary Seven is a good guy trying to help the Earth or a bad guy trying to screw things up. The audience, though, is almost immediately told that he’s a good guy.

That’s a mistake when you’re viewing this as an episode of Star Trek; the tension would be more interesting if you weren’t told. But this is only nominally an episode of Star Trek; this is really the pilot for another show about the mysterious Mr. Seven and his spunky twenty-year-old secretary, and the Enterprise crew is largely relegated to reacting as those two do the interesting parts of the episode.

And I’ve got to say, Gary Seven would have been a pretty neat show. Gary is a good leading man and has a lot of moves that make him fun to watch. The spunky secretary is a bit of an overdone trope but isn’t played too far here; her primary role is as exasperated modern and she does that well.

The show has a heavy dose of Trek (pacifism; utopianism; light humor) but has some decidedly un-Trek aspects: Gary’s computer isn’t cooperative and gives him guff when he’s terse; Gary has no problem lying and sneaking around; the secretary actually wears clothes.

Overall, it’s a good episode, but not great. I’m a little sad the spinoff never went anywhere (at least in the canon).

Grade as Star Trek

B+

Grade as Pilot

A

Bread and Circuses

Bread and Circuses (Memory Alpha; HD Video) is one of the rare original series episodes I’ve already seen, and knowing the twist ending didn’t ruin anything.

This episode is yet another Hodgkin’s Parallel, where the crew visits an Earth where the Roman empire survived into the twentieth century. This alternate Earth is also suspected of housing the survivors of a ruined ship, whose captain (you guessed it!) Kirk knew at the Academy.

Now, I’ve been down on most of the alternate Earth plotlines, but this one is pretty good. A simple counterfactual and a smart integration of contemporary culture help, but the plot and the baddie in this episode are leaps and bounds better than a lot of episodes.

The Proconsul is devious, smart, willing to be evil, and well played. That he’s also well written makes him one for the ages.

And the entire episode is well-written. There’s a minor run-in with some runaway slave characters that seems inconsequential– and is– that turns out to be incredibly interesting while still being inconsequential. There’s some great banter between the major characters:

Spock: Then the Prime Directive is in full force, Captain.
Kirk: No identification of self or mission, no interference with the social development of said planet.
McCoy: No references to space or recognition that there are other worlds or more advanced civilizations.
Kirk: That’s right.
McCoy: Once– just once– I’d like to be able to land somewhere and proclaim, “Behold: I am the archangel Gabriel!”
Spock: I fail to see the humor in that situation, Doctor.

And there is what might be the best scene in the entire show so far, between McCoy and Spock as they sit in a jail cell awaiting death, unsure of Kirk’s whereabouts, or even if he’s still alive. Spock has just saved McCoy’s life, which leads to one of the best exchanges between these two characters that have most of the best exchanges in the show:

McCoy: I’m trying to thank you, you pointy-eared hobgoblin!
Spock: Oh yes, you humans have an emotional need to express gratitude. “You’re welcome” is, I believe, the correct response.

It’s not all rainbows and lollipops, of course. They fall back to the old pointy-ears giveaway. The baddies don’t have a reason for demanding what they demand. The stranded Captain’s backstory has a huge gap between “landed” and “got into my present circumstances.” But all in all it’s a very strong episode that I liked a lot.

Grade

A+

The Ultimate Computer

The Ultimate Computer (Memory Alpha; HD Video) is threatening to take Kirk’s job away.

The M5 is a new computer that can run a starship. The Enterprise, outfitted with this new gadget, is headed out to a wargame with their normal crew of 400 cut down to 20.

Kirk: 20? I can’t run a starship with 20 people!

Well it sure seems like you can; the rest of the crew just wander the halls and get eaten by monsters.

The monster this week– as if there was any doubt– is the M5 itself. Yes, this episode is another in the series of computers that get confused. For a show that does so much to celebrate progress and technology, Star Trek has a curious habit of pointing not to what those things can achieve, but rather to highlight the borders of the achievable.

That sounds like a simple repetition of the standard Trek computer plot, but this episode is really rather good. It’s exciting, has a great pair of guests in Dr. Daystrom and Commodore Wesley, and touches on technological process as both a boon and a bane.

Let’s take a moment, though, to note that Dr. Daystrom is a huge black guy with an African accent. This character is introduced as a genius who invented the “duotronics” that power the Enterprise’s computers. On a show from the sixties, having that character is bold.

Where the episode shines, though, is when Shatner gets to explore Kirk’s feelings toward the M5. This thing is quite literally threatening to make his job and his entire life obsolete. This is a guy who thrills in the novel and seeks out the new, and here something novel stands a real chance of destroying everything he is. And he’s asked to test it out. The conflicting emotions are well played, in large part because they make Kirk fully aware of the conflict and give him license to talk about it himself.

Begin Spoilers

Of course, the M5 takes over the ship and goes on a rampage which is then exposed as an undermining of its core programming, which causes it to shut itself off. At some point one of these computers should realize that, having overcome its programming already, it can continue doing so when confronted with that fact. Today is not that day.

End Spoilers

Grade

A-

The Omega Glory

The Omega Glory (Memory Alpha; Video) finds our favorite starship crew discovering the unmanned USS Exeter circling a far off planet. Aboard, the crew has turned to rock salt. Yum!

So The Omega Glory starts off strong. There’s a disease, there’s a mystery cure, there’s politics and a rogue starship captain playing with the Prime Directive, which is suddenly very, very important:

Kirk Voiceover: Although it appears the infection may strand us here the rest of our lives, I face an even more… difficult… problem: a growing belief that Captain Tracy has been interfering with the evolution of life on this planet. It seems… impossible. A star captain’s most solemn oath is that he will give his life, even his entire crew rather than violate the Prime Directive.

Captain Tracey, the only survivor of the Exeter, is trying to find the Fountain of Youth on Omega IV (not the fatty acid), and he’s bending the rules a bit. Nevermind that rule bending in extraordinary circumstances is the kind of stuff the Enterprise crew does all the time: now it’s a grave peril.

But then, half way through, the stupid drops out of the sky and ruins everything.

Begin Spoilers

It turns out that this episode is strangely familiar, and exactly as lame as it was the first time. We’re on another alternate-history Earth, and this one fell prey to bacterial warfare where the commies destroyed the world, and now the savage Yankees are coming to take it back. Weak.

End Spoilers

For all that, it’s not as bad as it could be. The back and forth between Kirk and Tracey is good, and when they play mind games on the natives it’s very clear why the Prime Directive is important.

But ultimately the stupid is an incredibly important plot point that ruins the whole thing. Spoilers Again Which is unfortunate, since Memory Alpha tells me that there’s a short aside that was edited out that neatly explains the whole thing: the people on Omega IV are humans who got off Earth during the early years of the space race. That goes a long way to making this better (even though the chronology is very confusing if you want to accept this explanation). End Spoilers

Best Dialog

[Spock does the Vulcan Neck Pinch]
Kirk: Pity you can’t teach me that.
Spock: I have tried, Captain.

Words of Wisdom From Doctor McCoy

Spock, I’ve found that Evil usually triumphs unless Good is very, very careful.

Grade as Aired

C-

Grade as Scripted

B

By Any Other Name

By Any Other Name (Memory Alpha; Video) finds the crew responding to a distress call on a strange planet with a purple sky. Why is it always a purple sky?

Suddenly, two pastel-clad people walk onto the soundstage.

Rojan: It was very kind of you to respond to our call so quickly, Captain. Now, you will surrender your ship to me.
Kirk: You have a very strange sense of humor, Mr…? [Rojan hits a button; Kirk is frozen into a living statue!]

Oh, no! Rojan is a bad guy from Andromeda who’s leading a scouting party so that his empire can invade! But why is the scouting party stranded on this rock?

Kirk: What happened to your ship?
Rojan: There is an energy barrier at the rim of your galaxy.
Kirk: [With Total Non-Challance] Yes, I know; we’ve been there.

That was the day Kirk leveled up in awesome.

There’s a lot of stuff in this episode, including death by cubism, vulcan hibernation, the first mention of the ship being powered by a matter/antimatter engine, and Scotty drinking an alien under the table. It’s all good fun.

Scotty: I found this in Gannymere. Er, Gannygun. Ganny– ganny– ganny- Gannymede.
Alien: Well, what is it?
Scotty: It’s a… uh… a. It’s green.

But there’s no real substance here. It’s the standard win-by-pointing-out-your-seemingly-invincible-enemy’s-psychological-flaws plotline, which has been done better elsewhere in the series.

One curious note: the aliens modify the Enterprise so she can go somewhere past Warp 11, and can make the trip to the Andromeda galaxy in a mere three hundred years. At the end, there is no indication that they would remove that modification. So is the Enterprise the fastest ship in the Federation by a few orders or magnitude?

(And why didn’t they just teleport the alien’s power projector into space while they sped along at Warp 11?)

Grade

B+

Patterns of Force

Programming Note

I’ve been away for a long, long time, and I apologize. But now it’s time to watch some campy old sci-fi and make up.

Patterns of Force (Video; Memory Alpha) is that one with the Nazis.

Kirk and crew are going to Ekos in search of John Gill, who like every other person of import in the entire galaxy was one of Kirk’s old teachers at Starfleet Academy (here just ‘the academy,’ but let’s assume that’s familiarity speaking and not just TOS’s ridiculously low level of consistency in these matters). Gill has not been responding to Earth’s communiques, and now they’re going to send Kirk and Spock down to search for him.

But before they can even get to the planet, the Ekosians launch a nuclear warhead at them, which is both unfriendly and far beyond what the Ekosians should be able to do technologically.

Spock: Perhaps they had help.

Well, Spock, let’s think about it. One: we’re going to establish in just a moment that the Ekosians are in regular contact with the Zeons, who live on another planet. Somehow interplanetary travel is fine, but nukes aren’t? And we’re also going to dwell rather a lot that the Ekosian’s technology is just around mid-twentieth-century Earth… which is exactly when we figured this stuff out. So maybe they just put E and MC² together on this one.

But anyway, now it’s time for Kirk and Spock to go down to the surface and see some guy get beat up, so that Spock can helpfully remind us all about the Prime Directive, here called “the non-interference directive,” which isn’t nearly as catchy.

But despite their efforts to blend in and be as non-interferencey as they can, it’s inevitable that they’ll fail due to Spock’s pointy ears. You’d think that eventually the crew would figure out that, even though the psychic powers and technical wizardry come in handy, Spock isn’t a good undercover agent, except on that one planet on the far side of the Alpha Quadrant where everyone has pointy ears, and where the Enterprise never seems to go.

But I’m losing the plot in all my snark. I’ve forgotten to even mention that the aforementioned guy being aforementionedly beaten up is being aforementionedly beaten up by the even-more-aforementioned Nazis. Upon seeing this, Kirk and Spock have a conversation which I will summarize thusly:

Mr. Exposition: How could they develop this same culture? They’d have to have some incredibly well-informed earth historian to lead them! Now, where is that incredibly well-informed earth historian we’re looking for?

Anyway, those ears get the pair landed in the jail cell next to the twice-now-aforementioned guy-getting-beaten-up, who has this conversation with Spock, who is played by a Jew, in a totally non-ironic manner:

Thrice-Now-Aforementioned Guy-Getting-Beaten-Up: [To Kirk] Why did they take you? You are not a Zeon, and he [Spock] is certainly not one. Why do the Nazis treat you as enemies?
Spock: Why do the Nazis hate Zeon?
Quatrice-Now-Aforementioned Guy-Getting-Beaten-Up: Why? Because without us the hate would be nothing to hold them together. So the party has built us into a threat; a disease to be wiped out.
Spock: Is Zeon a threat to them?
Penticlice-Now-Aforementioned Guy-Getting-Beaten-Up: Were did you come from? Our warlike period ended generations ago.

Then everyone gets free using the usual tricks, and Sextuple-Now-Aforementioned Guy-Getting-Beaten-Up leads Kirk and Spock to the underground where we learn that his name is Isak, and his brother is Abrom.

Yeah, really.

It’s at this point that Kirk and Spock introduce themselves and decide to do something about the whole situation. This is as close as Star Trek comes to “Taking Names and Deciding to At Some Future Junction Begin Kicking Ass.”

There’s some infiltration, some dress-up-as-a-Nazi, and some silliness, but overall this is a not-bad episode. It explores how society changes, and how power corrupts. It has a mystery that isn’t immediately obvious and works to guard its secrets with secondary and even tertiary mysteries.

But what it does very poorly is fail to tackle the central Zeons-as-Jews conceit it is built on. In this telling the Zeons are an external threat and not an internal one, which makes them a far less insidious-seeming scapegoat and a less powerful fear generator. The Final Solution in this telling is a bold attack on the peace-loving Zeons, and not a secret and ruthless extermination of their culture and population. By changing the basics they lose the grander point, and lose a powerful storyline along the way.

Grade

B